How can the media weaken democracy?
Answers
Explanation:
Media has given political parties the tools to reach large numbers of people and can inform them on key issues ranging from policies to elections. In theory, media should be seen as an enabler for democracy, having better-educated voters would lead to a more legitimate government.
Answer:
How does media impact our democracy?
Normal use of social media can be equally helpful to all politicians, far-right or otherwise. But the negative use of social media, as in the Trump and Bolsonaro campaigns, intrinsically advantages anti-democratic political factions over their opponents.
Now, spreading misinformation isn’t necessarily a silver bullet for winning elections. It sure seems social media abuse helped Bolsonaro, but the extent is not quite clear. Studies conflict on whether fake news helped Trump win the 2016 election. A review from a group of leading interdisciplinary experts, published in the prestigious journal Science last March, found that there was not yet sufficient evidence to determine how effective abuses of social media are in shifting voting behavior. They could matter, and could even matter a lot; right now, we just don’t know enough to say.
But the abuse of social media can have more subtly corrosive effects on a democracy. Authoritarians don’t win solely by spreading their own message; they win by exploiting conditions under which citizens become either indifferent to democratic institutions or actively hostile to them. By working to increase political apathy and undermining trust in established institutions, far-right parties strengthen themselves at the expense of mainstream parties.
The abuse of social media can be used to inflame these tensions — in essence, providing oxygen to the underlying social trends that produced far-right authoritarians in the first place. When fake news is flying around, no matter who’s spreading it, people lose faith in the trustworthiness of their social institutions or perhaps even in the very idea of truth in politics. The spread of that attitude disproportionately benefits authoritarian factions in elections and weakens democratic ones.
Explanation: